‘Another fellow put the drill through my finger, silly bugger. They all wanted to rush me off to hospital to get a tetanus needle. I didn’t want it. I was alright.’
Evelyn Lonsdale
John Curtin announced the compulsory call-up of women on the night of 26 January 1943 after the response to voluntary recruitment had not met with demand. Indelicate placement of their recruitment campaign advertisements may not have helped the cause. Next to an ad for De Witt’s Antacid Powder (‘A Friend In Need For Flatulence’), an April issue of the Australian Women’s Weekly featured an ad bearing an image of a tin-hatted digger overlooking a housewife polishing a table.
Come on housewife, Take a ‘VICTORY JOB’. You’ll find it no harder than your house jobs. Easier perhaps. In fact many war production factories, with their spic-and-span canteens, bright music and carefully planned rest breaks are more fun to work in than any house. Come in and have a chat with another woman at your nearest National Service Office. She’ll understand how you feel if you’ve never gone out on a job before. Come on. Change your job for him—won’t you?
With a large percentage of males removed from the workforce, and the pool of unemployed men from the depression years now employed, work opportunities for women expanded during the war years. After the bombing of Darwin, positions opened for women in new munitions factories. However, conditions were often not pleasant, with rest breaks, bright music and fun overshadowed by the health dangers common to munitions factories. To get through the day, many women workers became reliant on analgesics to relieve headaches caused by the use of nitrates in the manufacture of munitions. It was a case of a cup of tea, a Bex and then back to the production line. The image presented of triumphant, healthy, happy, shackle-breaking women labouring through the war years is in stark contrast to the reality. Much of the work was simply monotonous, and of major concern was the lack of childcare facilities. The powers-that-be hadn’t thought it through, the government and their advisers being mostly males. The authorities couldn’t seem to grasp the connection between the practicalities of feeding a growing family, caring for ageing parents, and holding down a job.
For those who did answer their country’s call, ingrained prejudices persisted. The children of working women, dubbed latchkey kids, were often singled out as responsible for the rise in juvenile delinquency, and the absent mothers copped the blame, scapegoats for a lack of support and understanding from the authorities. While the demands of work were high, women’s pay rates never quite met those of the male populations. There were exceptions: bus ‘conductresses’ were paid the male wage, but behind this apparently forward-thinking decision lurked an ulterior motive. The unions were worried that come war’s end, if the women wished to continue working for a lower rate, employers might choose them over men. The unions wanted their members back when peace came, and at full pay.
Younger women were also coming under attack from members of a bygone generation who were concerned about the moral decline they perceived among the carefree women who strolled around arm in arm with foreigners in regimental regalia. Some in positions of authority agreed. On 25 February 1943 a headline in the Melbourne Sun declared ‘Deputy Premier alarmed at Moral Drift’. The deputy premier of Victoria, Albert Eli Lind, called for the closing of hotels on Saturday afternoons. He warned that: ‘Associated with men under the influence of drink who have been guzzling and should have been protected from getting more—I am referring to men in uniform—you will find girls of tender years. I am alarmed at the way in which we are drifting—to see these girls in the arms of men they have, perhaps, never seen before.’ And by inference, we are led to conclude, would never see again.
An article in The Sydney Morning Herald on Saturday 6 November complained of scenes of intoxication and unseemly behaviour amid the sordid city nightlife. Under the headline ‘A Disgrace to Sydney’, the writer makes the following claim:
Apart from the discredit they bring to the city and the offence they give to decent citizens, it is alarming that drunkenness and immorality should be so rife among adolescent girls and young women who are not only sowing an imminent crop of misery for themselves but jeopardising their whole future as potential wives and mothers. They are to be observed in the company of Servicemen at all hours of the night, and, according to police reports, they represent a large proportion of those who frequent shady cabarets and residentials . . . It is the ‘amateurs,’ not the ‘professionals’—to use the accepted police terms—who constitute the grave and growing danger to our social standards and to the future of our race.
This word jockey appears to be riding an extremely high horse. He gallops on: ‘These [women], flattered by the attentions and money lavished upon them by men in uniform, bent only upon having a “good time,” and more often than not the victims of parental neglect or indifference, have now attained numbers which appal all those who know the facts.’ And he wasn’t about to stop there. Perhaps they should have considered rationing printer’s ink.
It is not the least of the evils of war that it inevitably induces among the less stable elements of the population a loosening of morals and the other social restraints which apply in normal times. Work and cash are plentiful, servicemen are constantly in search of female companions to beguile their hours on furlough, and unscrupulous panders make profits from providing opportunities for sordid immorality or from the sale of black-market liquor, or from both. The State Government must be given credit for some checks to the sly grog trade in the metropolitan area and for closing down several of the more sinister night clubs.
Why do I get the impression this reporter would like nothing more than a schooner of sly grog and a night out at Club Sinister? But wait, there’s more. ‘That only an insignificant proportion of these miscreants is apprehended is proved by the facility with which their noxious wares can be purchased and by the squalid exhibitions of drinking to be seen nightly in parks, streets, and doorways.’ He certainly seems to have done his homework.
We can safely assume that these lusty trumpetings of moral decay were somewhat overstated. Yet there was no doubt that ample opportunity for sexual misdemeanours was available. Armed with accents, cigarettes and confidence, the American boys were fond of giving flowers to the local women, orchids especially, as well as their main bait, nylon stockings. Silk stockings were impossible to come by in wartime, and the girls resorted to drawing fake seams down the back of their bare calves with a black eyebrow pencil. It took a steady hand and a lot of patience to venture out in a pair of fishnets in those days.
Evelyn and her sister Dot went through quite a few eyebrow pencils. Dot remembers a date with an American serviceman named Horace.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Horace was married or had a girl at home . . . He just asked me because there was an American Ball on in Redfern and he wanted a partner. He gave me this great big posy. I couldn’t find a spot to put it on my dress. When we came out to go home, there was all these boys from Redfern, ‘Ah, we’ll get you, Yank,’ and Horace said to me, ‘Quick, come on, let’s run.’ So we did. Every time he came into port he’d call me up, just for company.
While the Americans showered the local girls with chocolates and stockings, on a night out with a local boy you’d be lucky to get a crayon and a Polly Waffle. Dot also recalls a night out with Henry, a Mascot boy who kicked things off by presenting her with a packet of liquorice allsorts before eating the lot of them at the pictures. The Americans were ahead of the game—dating was part of their culture. They knew all the tricks: bring a gift, be attentive and appear to care. Appearances might have been deceiving but the local women didn’t mind—they weren’t used to being attended to. Many suspected it was all show. One woman remarked, ‘I’m sure they could forget a girl as quickly as anyone else. But they seemed different; they seemed to put a higher value on the relationship. They seemed to like women’s company more than Australian men did.’
All this American insincerity was a welcome contrast to the mundane and awkward manner of the local boys. As the Americans well knew, confidence is everything. In fact, many were overconfident. However, unwanted advances were stopped in their tracks. Young Australian women wore hatpins in those days and most weren’t afraid to use them when necessary. The local women also had their own bait when it came to attracting the Americans. If you mixed two tablespoons of golden syrup with a tablespoon each of honey, lemon juice, and boiling water, stirred well and served hot, you would have created the perfect lure for tempting an American soldier: homemade Australian maple syrup. Some girls took advantage of the Americans’ generosity on dates by reselling the prized orchids to florists the next morning at half the retail price.
In Melbourne, the young Toni ‘Lolly-Legs’ Lamond passed Flinders Street Station, the main Melbourne meeting place, on her way to evening dancing lessons. ‘I very much took notice of the pretty girls, with flowers in their hair. They were there to meet the American soldiers, sailors and airmen. I was very interested in how they wore their hair—like Betty Grable, who was just making her name. When I was fourteen, Max Reddy [Toni’s stepfather] was in a military concert party which was going into the jungles of New Guinea, dangerous places like that.’ He was based at Pagewood in Sydney, and because he was going to be there for a few months, Toni’s mother Stella locked up the flat and moved the family to a room in Kellett Street in Sydney’s Kings Cross. ‘I was thrilled. I could walk around the corner, and be right there in the middle of the Cross, and see the Yanks with pretty girls (with flowers in their hair) by the hundreds, while I stood outside the milk bar listening to the jukebox. Wishing I was older!’
While Stanley had his days free, Evelyn was gainfully employed. Having been called up, she was in the army now. The first stage of recruitment was restricted to women aged eighteen to twenty-one. Evelyn Lonsdale was twenty-one and single and lived very close to Sydney Airport. Previously, when she wasn’t helping her mother out in the shop she’d been working at William R. Warner and Co. at 508 Riley Street, Surry Hills, with her friends Heather and Joyce. ‘It was like a ballot,’ Evelyn recalled fifty years later, of the recruitment process. ‘We all got a shock, you know, and I got my letter last. Heather and Joyce got theirs first, and off they went. And then I got one. I had to give the letter to a person in town, they had to sign it and then they sent me out to the aerodrome. The three of us finished up at the aerodrome.’ Evelyn was to be trained as a riveter at Sydney Airport.
Her wartime work experience was not commensurate with that of the girls in the munitions factories. The government had targeted intelligent women in particular, and Evelyn had outshone every other student at Mascot Primary School, receiving a scholarship to attend a private girls school in the city. She’d seized the opportunity, devouring books, learning languages and gaining the respect of her teachers. It seemed there was nothing at which she didn’t excel. Music was her great love, and the piano her instrument of choice. Her skills on the piano were not so much in demand when it came to wartime occupations, but her grasp of mathematics qualified her for a position making tools for and repairing military aircraft. Evelyn talked with great fondness of her days riveting bombers in the hangars at Mascot, a duty she found far from challenging.
I had a man on one side of the wing and I was on the other; I couldn’t see him, all I could do was hear him. You had to be very careful, and I had the rivet gun—you had to go gently, so you didn’t hurt the aluminium of the plane. But that was all there was to it. Then when he’d done a wing, that’d be it for the next few hours. Go and get lost. And I was getting men’s wages, I couldn’t believe it. That was an easy place, you’d sneak out and go to the canteen and have a coffee. You did so much and no more. We used to go outside and sit in the sun, and the air force boys would come out and sit with us, and we’d all be sitting there having a party. I could never figure it out. I did so little. And I used to think, is this how men earn their money? You know, I’d been working hard at the pharmaceutical company, and I just couldn’t believe it.
A few adventurous women had already contributed to the history of the airport. In the 1920s, aviation was predominantly a male occupation; not being wage-earners, most women could never afford flying lessons. The Australian Aero Club eventually opened its doors to women in 1926, and in 1927 Millicent Bryant entered the domain after becoming the first woman in Australia to obtain a pilot’s licence, soon to be followed by Margaret Reardon and Evelyn Follett. But it was the arrival of Englishwoman Amy Johnson at Mascot in 1930 in her ‘Jason’ Gipsy Moth that put paid to any notions that a woman was less of a flyer than a man. She’d travelled alone all the way from the United Kingdom. This opened the door for local girl Nancy Bird, who learned the ropes at the recently opened Kingsford Smith Flying School in 1933. The immaculately coiffed Smithy was not initially keen on the idea of female pilots, but the school needed both pupils and money, and he soon realised Nancy Bird was more than up to the task. Nancy had been saving her own pennies, and when she turned nineteen she bought herself a second-hand Gipsy Moth and set off joyriding around New South Wales. Nancy later secured a job at the airport cleaning spark plugs on Smithy’s Southern Cross. During World War II she trained other young women hired to lend support to the Royal Australian Air Force. I have no idea if Evelyn was among her students.
With so many men out of the picture, women became more reliant on each other. Australia is yet to invent a term for the female equivalent of mateship, but during those years, women, children, single girls and grandmothers worked together to keep their families and the economy afloat. The excitements of the social scene were restricted mainly to young inner-city girls; for others it was a hard slog. For most, the war at home was a time of hardship and insecurity, and the sooner the show ended the better.